Pieces of a Life
by shiiki
Summary: [SPOILERS FOR TBM] Reyna struggles to form a complete picture of a friend.


**A/N:** Warning—this fic contains spoilers for _The Burning Maze._ If you have not read that, maybe you want to come back later.

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Pieces of a Life

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There are many things Reyna likes about being a praetor of New Rome.

Making funeral arrangements is not one of them.

Especially not when the deceased is her oldest friend at Camp Jupiter. The first to welcome her at the Little Tiber when she arrived, lonely and exhausted after being separated from Hylla and running with Lupa for days. Her fellow praetor, whom she once hoped might become … more.

There's no _more._ All that's left of her friend is a cold coffin.

And now she's supposed to pare down his life into a few pithy lines.

 _Valiant hero. Dependable leader. Trusted friend._

Reyna rips up the piece of paper on which she's been trying to pen Jason's eulogy. She's lost track of the number of times she's scrapped her work. Nothing she writes is _wrong,_ but none of it is right either.

How do you sum up a life in a five minute speech?

She should be able to do this. It's not the first eulogy she's had to deliver in her years as praetor. In fact, one of her earliest tasks was to write one for Jason's predecessor, a son of Apollo she greatly admired, when he fell in the Battle of Mount Othrys.

(Yes, a son of Apollo. The irony of it doesn't escape her.)

She wrote that speech with Jason. They stayed up all night, sharing memories of their former praetor, so that the ache from losing a mentor slowly dulled. She remembers looking at him that night and wondering … to Chaos with Venus, could they be more?

Who will share memories of Jason with her now?

She could have asked Frank to do this. He's a good, dependable officer, not unlike Jason … not unlike Jason _was._ Though Frank wears his insecurities on his breastplate in a way Jason never did.

(How many secrets were Jason hiding, that he never divulged?)

Frank wouldn't shirk this task if she handed it to him. But … Reyna's an officer of Rome, too, and she can no more palm off her duties than she can shadow travel.

Besides, _she_ is the one who knew Jason. Insofar as anyone here could know Jason. Everyone in the legion knew him, of course. He'd been here forever. And yet … it seems like they only ever knew _of_ him. He was that friend, the one who always gave you his shoulder to lean on, but never seemed to need it in return. Always the kind smile, the steady, solid hand.

He was the fearless leader, the consummate hero. The one who had it all together. The legion's perfect, golden boy. He never spoke of his fears or his insecurities to anyone, not even her.

And then he met the Greeks. Reyna saw right away that they touched him in a way Rome never had. It was only after he embraced them that she began to see the little things she missed. The pieces that she's now struggling to add to her complete picture of the boy she knew.

Now that he's gone and given his life for them.

Okay, she knows that's not a fair way to look at it. Even if he sacrificed himself for his Greek friends, this _emperor_ that took his life … the monster hails from the Roman empire. Besides, they aren't enemies any more, Romans and Greeks. She herself chose to risk her life for peace between their camps. She respects her Greek friends, some of them possibly more than her fellow Roman officers.

But she still couldn't look Apollo in the eye when he told her—in excruciating detail (well, she _asked,_ and surreal as it seems, the ex-god actually seemed too frightened of _her_ not to comply)—how Jason went into the battle having decided his course of action. _Knowing_ that someone had to die, and vowing that it would be him instead of his friends.

He may have chosen the Greeks, but he died like a Roman in the end—sacrificing himself for a cause.

But maybe … maybe that is the Greek way, too.

Roman, Greek, maybe there's not that great a divide between them. In the end, all that matters is that they are heroes.

Maybe that's how Jason would want her to remember him.

Reyna rubs her forehead, sure that she's still missing something. She looks up at the golden statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. She came to this temple, hoping that being at the site of Jason's heritage would help her find answers. But maybe she's in the wrong place.

Maybe _he's_ in the wrong place. How can she give a Roman burial to someone who is just as devotedly Greek? How can she do justice to him when she can articulate his background, but not his personal choices?

Ironically, the people who could help her the most now are the ones who took him from her. Reyna actually wishes Piper were here. She recalls how the daughter of Aphrodite came to her after the battle with Gaia and offered her strength should she ever need it. Reyna can't deny the sting of betrayal she felt when she realised Jason would not return to Camp Jupiter, but she has since come to appreciate Piper McLean for her spirit and generosity.

Piper could have kept Jason with her, mourned him in the Greek way. But she recognised that Jason was part of more than one world, and she sent him here to give Reyna her chance to honour him as well.

Piper left her a single note, delivered by Apollo's bespectacled waif of a companion, but if there's a message in there, Reyna can't decipher it. There are no instructions, no requests, just a simple page describing a time when Jason snuck out after curfew and the two of them climbed the roof of his cabin at Camp Half-Blood and sat under the stars all night, remembering another friend. Reading it, Reyna can barely reconcile Jason's actions with the serious, rule-abiding Roman praetor she knew. It is a tantalising glimpse at a side of him that she never got the chance—will never get the chance—to know.

There were so many facets to Jason Grace.

She's still holding the scraps of her torn-up eulogy draft in her hands. Reyna opens her fingers and lets the wind scatter them over the marble floor. Several pieces blow back in her face. She catches them in her palm and reads them out absently.

'Hero. Leader. Friend.'

'Brother,' says a voice.

A sharp jolt runs through Reyna when she turns to see blue eyes—an electric blue that she expected never to stare into again.

But of course, there _is_ someone else who shares Jason's eyes. Someone whose grief must be even sharper than Reyna's own.

Thalia Grace's footsteps are softer than a cat's. Reyna didn't even notice her approach, though maybe that's because she's been so deep in thought. Thalia obviously sees the shock, followed quickly by disappointment, in Reyna's eyes. She looks down, swallowing hard.

'I should get used to that, huh?'

Reyna shakes her head. 'No, it's—' She sighs. There's no point denying it. 'It might take a while before …'

Before what? Before they forget? Before the reminder stops hurting?

She changes tack. 'Are you okay?'

Thalia frowns at the statue of Jupiter. She doesn't answer, and Reyna can probably understand that. There _is_ no real answer to that question.

'He doesn't really look like that,' she says at last.

Reyna blinks at the god—or at least, the Roman artist's rendition of him in thirty feet of gold. 'Jupiter? Or I guess you mean Zeus?'

Thalia shakes her head. 'Jupiter. Though I didn't realise that until later. He used to come around a lot when I was a kid. Before—well, until Jason was born, anyway.' She scowls at the statue of her father. 'Either way, he has plenty to answer for. That's _twice_ now he's let Jason be taken away.'

Reyna half-expects a thunderbolt to strike Thalia on the spot, but the answering rumble in the sky is almost sad, like a storm on the verge of weeping.

She wonders if Jupiter mourns his son, too. What is it like to be a god when your children keep dying and you have to keep sending them into danger anyway, because your power is helpless against the recurrent rise of evil in the world?

She might have to ask Apollo. The prophecy he dropped in her lap— _unless the doorway to the soundless god is opened by the daughter of Bellona_ —flickers across her mind. One more thing to think about later. (Though she already knows she'll do whatever it takes to fight these—her mind gags on the word— _Roman_ emperors. How can she not, after Jason's sacrifice?)

Then what Thalia just said registers. 'Twice?'

Of course. She never did get the full story of how Jason lost his sister. When she arrived at Camp Jupiter, he was already such a permanent fixture that she assumed he was a legacy, one of the privileged few who had been raised in the bosom of New Rome. It wasn't until their first quest together, tracking down Bacchus's missing leopard in Sonoma, that he admitted his journey had begun at the Wolf House, just like the rest of them. ' _My mom left me there when I was two. I've been at camp ever since._ '

She didn't push. It wasn't like she wanted to talk about _her_ background either.

Now, as Thalia tells her about their flighty mother, the alcoholic starlet who somehow managed to capture the king of the gods' attention twice, Reyna wishes she'd pressed Jason for details after all. They had so much more in common than she ever realised.

Reyna has embraced her Roman heritage, but she knows that her life was shaped by more than just who her mother is. She's a daughter a Bellona, but she's also the sister of Hylla, a trainee of Circe, a pirate's apprentice with buccaneering running in her veins …

She is beginning to realise that _before_ Camp Jupiter, before Lupa … the biggest influence on Jason's life may indeed have been Greek. _This_ Greek, whose stories about her brother are now spilling out like a dam inside her has been broken.

Reyna listens, fascinated, as Thalia describes toddler Jason. 'He tried to eat a stapler once.'

'No way.' She waits a beat. 'You're serious?'

'When he was two. You know that scar on his lip?' Thalia points to her own. 'Gods, it scared me to death. I turned my back for two seconds and he was bleeding all over the place.'

'And here we all thought it was a souvenir from some early battle. I don't even think _Jason_ knew where it came from.'

Thalia's mouth twists. 'In a way, it was. He called it the stapler monster. I was struggling with my homework. Don't know how he noticed, but I guess he got it into his head that if he chewed up my pencil case—or everything inside—it would solve my problems.'

Reyna almost chokes on the laugh that bubbles up—a watery, painful laugh, but a laugh all the same. 'That's … that actually does sound a lot like him. My first day at camp, I was a bit … well, I guess you could say I spoke out of turn, and a few of the older kids tried to put me in my place. Jason noticed right off, and jumped in. It pissed me off at first—I wanted to fight my own battles, you know? But Jason always noticed when anyone got picked on.'

That was Jason. He always made it his business to see people who might otherwise fade into the background. Funnily enough, it was when she ceased to be the invisible new kid, when she rose through the ranks to become his equal, that she felt like he stopped paying attention.

But maybe that's not quite fair. Just because he didn't notice her in _that_ way, it didn't mean he stopped caring.

As they trade stories back and forth, the funny, the silly, the endearing and the exasperating—all the missing pieces in their picture of their friend and brother—she starts to understand who Jason is. Who Jason was. The kid raised by this Greek tempest of a sister, before he was spirited away to Camp Jupiter to be drilled into an austere soldier of Rome. She begins to see that his affinity with Camp Half-Blood may, in a way, be a return to his roots.

And as the dawn creeps up upon them, marking the morning of Jason's funeral, Reyna knows what she has to do.

She stands on the Rostra of New Rome, facing a packed Forum. The entire legion has turned out for the eulogy, and even most of the city's residents. Jason may have renounced his praetorship, but Rome is still keen to claim him. _Born a Roman, die a Roman …_

Only Reyna is about to go against thousands of years of tradition.

She meets Thalia's eyes across the Rostra. It gives her the courage to forge ahead, to push down the voice inside her, screaming, _just go with the formalities! Don't break tradition!_

She takes a deep breath and addresses the waiting crowd. 'I'm supposed to be telling you about Jason Grace today. How he was a valiant hero, a dependable leader, a trusted friend. The embodiment of everything a Roman should be. And he _was_ all of those things. But …' Piper's letter, tucked into the folds of her toga, crinkles as she shifts. 'Those were the things we _wanted_ him to be. He served Camp Jupiter and New Rome faithfully, and we will never forget that. But today I want to make sure that the other things he cared about are not forgotten either.'

The crowd shifts uncomfortably, the older legionnaires in particular recognising that she's departing from protocol. Reyna keeps her gaze on the brass fixtures of Jason's coffin. For fifteen years, Jason did everything Camp Jupiter asked of him, everything they needed. For once, they can bend to accommodate _him._

'While we honour his service as a former praetor of the Twelfth Legion Fulminata, it would be wrong us to lay claim to him entirely. Jason may have been a son of Jupiter, but he belonged to a different tradition as well. Before he came to us, he was raised by his sister, a proud daughter of Zeus. And later, he formed a bridge between our two worlds.'

She nods to Thalia, who steps forward with Frank, each bearing a thin fabric in their arms. Thalia's is orange; Frank's purple. A brilliant white eagle stretches its wings across both shrouds, bridging them.

'Jason belonged to both camps. He was a reminder that as different as we are, we have much more in common. And he would have wanted to be honoured in a way that represents both traditions.'

With sad gentleness, Frank lifts Jason's body so Thalia can wrap it in both shrouds before carefully setting him back into the wooden coffin. Reyna pulls out Piper's letter, and with it, another page she penned while she and Thalia sat in the pre-dawn light, putting into words their most cherished memory of their friend and brother.

'There is so much more I could say about Jason, but instead of standing here and reciting a whole bunch of adjectives about him, I'm going to ask you to contribute your own.'

She descends the Rostra and tucks both pages into Jason's shroud. 'We all thought we knew Jason Grace. But he was more than each one of us could comprehend. And only together can we give voice to who he truly was.'

There are murmurs from the crowd, an undercurrent of disapproval at her choices, her insistence on recognising Jason as a Greek. The die-hard traditionalists will probably challenge her later. But the people who do matter—Jason's friends, the entire fifth cohort, other legionnaires whose lives he's touched—are doing as she asked.

She'll deal with the dissenters later, and she'll stand by her decisions. This isn't about them, or politics, or even Rome. It's about a boy, a friend, a hero who did his best to see the people around him and give them a voice.

He deserves to be seen, too. All of him.

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 **A/N** : Okay, I think this is the last of the reaction pieces. I am all written out on angst. Well, almost. I have another character death to deal with this week, but I vote we take a nice long break before more people dying.

Anyway, I owe a big thanks to **jacegrace04** for a long, detailed chat about Jason and his characterisation in the series, as well as possible funerary practices. The funeral scene was what stalled this fic for a week. I scrapped it almost as many times as Reyna scrapped her eulogy. At one point, Nico was going to show, and then I thought hang on, where's Percy and Annabeth, and that was when I realised RR's dates for ToA and MCGA don't seem to match up (what else is new?) I'm still not completely sold on the ending, but oh well.


End file.
